BadtimeforSamsungMobileandAndroid-baseddevices

Between October and December 2014, the iPhone propelled Apple to a record quarterly profit of $18 billion. Over at Samsung, profits for the company’s Mobile division fell 64.2 percent to $1.8 billion. How is this possible, given that both companies sold about the same number of smartphones worldwide during the holiday quarter?

The average selling price of the iPhone jumped to $687, compared to just $254 for Android-based devices, according to ABI Research and The Wall Street Journal.

According to the report, the average selling price for an iPhone jumped by around $87 from the previous quarter. Meanwhile, year over year, the average price of an Android-based device dropped by $100.

Yes, things are bad for Google’s Android. However, things are much worse at Microsoft’s handheld division where the average smartphone sells for just $45. Yes, $45.

Last week, Apple announced that they had sold a record 74.5 million iPhones during the first fiscal quarter of 2015.

In recent years, many in the technology community have said that Apple should compete with low-cost Android devices to gain market share. The numbers presented here suggest that this would have been a very bad idea.